null intent redelivered to Service onStartCommand()

Question

In the Android documentation, the Service's "onStartCommand()" has an intent given as a param, that according to the docs:

"the Intent supplied to startService(Intent), as given. This may be null if the service is being restarted after its process has gone away, and it had previously returned anything except START_STICKY_COMPATIBILITY."

However, the return value START_REDELIVER_INTENT is supposed to return the original intent when restarting a service.

Can anyone explain why an intent can be null, even if the flag was set to START_REDELIVER_INTENT?

Answer 1

Are you possibly confusing START_FLAG_REDELIVERY with START_REDELIVER_INTENT? Your post says, "the return value START_FLAG_REDELIVERY". That constant is not one of the values returned from onStartCommand, it is one of the bit values passed into onStartCommand as the flags parameter. START_FLAG_REDELIVERY and START_STICKY both have value of 1. If you mistakenly have return START_FLAG_REDELIVERY at the end of onStartCommand(), the service will restart in sticky mode with a null intent if there are no start commends pending.